Donald Trump continued wading into racial politics on the eve of the critical Super Tuesday primaries as several Republican leaders stepped up attacks on the bellicose billionaire they fear will put a Democrat in the White House and splinter their party into oblivion.
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Voting occurs throughout the day, but polls will close at different times. “It will be a very bitter divide that will make the fight between Rockefeller and Goldwater look like a kumbaya moment”.
The worries among Republicans appeared to grow after Trump briefly refused to disavow former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke during a television interview.
“Are you from Mexico?” the presumptive Republican front-runner asked the protester. Trump later said he had not understood the interviewer who first raised the question about Duke, and he did repudiate him.
Digging deeper, Trump’s support in head-to-head match-ups with Cruz and Rubio is strong among important subgroups in the Republican Party.
But a third party that remained in existence beyond 2016 could presage a permanent GOP breakup, cautioned Pitney.
“This is the party of (1860s president) Abraham Lincoln”, said Senator Ben Sasse, accusing Trump of being a non-conservative plotting a “hostile takeover” of the party.
The state’s top voting officials expect those numbers to continue growing on Super Tuesday, as Texans cast their first votes in what has become a nasty presidential primary battle.
“If Donald Trump is the nominee, Hillary in all likelihood wins”, arch-conservative Mr Cruz told a rally in his home state of Texas. After crushing her main Democratic rival Bernie Sanders in the South Carolina Democratic primary, she is now in a strong position to win the Democratic nomination.
After a decisive victory in Saturday’s SC primary, Mrs Clinton has shed almost all references to her Democratic opponent, choosing instead to focus on Mr Trump.
Both candidates, however, are trying to avoid political kryptonite and use Super Tuesday’s massive chunk of delegates to coast to the nomination. Based on our latest poll of more than 4,200 registered Republican voters, even if the Republican race were reduced to either Trump versus Rubio, or Trump versus Cruz, Trump would emerge victorious.
Signaling her growing confidence, Clinton has increasingly turned her attention to Trump in recent days, casting herself as a civil alternative to the insults and bullying that have consumed the Republican race. He told supporters in Minneapolis that they could “make history”. Just under half of those who responded would not commit to backing him, foreshadowing a potentially extraordinary break come July.
The lines are already being drawn around the country and across the state.
Clinton was supported by at least 80 percent of black voters in the Deep South and Texas.
Sanders – who enjoys the most positive favorable rating of any presidential candidate in the field, according to the poll – tops all three Republicans by wide margins: 57 percent to 40 percent against Cruz, 55 percent to 43 percent against Trump, and 53 percent to 45 percent against Rubio. “What we can’t let happen is the scapegoating, the flaming, the finger-pointing that is going on the Republican side”, she said in Springfield, Mass. “It really undermines our fabric as a nation”. “‘Anybody but Hillary is the mantra of a lot of people in our party'”.
Former Minnesota Gov. Jesse Ventura said he can not decide whether to support Trump or Sanders. Or perhaps Trump will select Christie as his vice presidential running mate?
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John Whitbeck, chairman of the state Republican Party, said he doubts there will be many instances of Democrats or Republicans voting in the other party’s primary because too much is at stake in each contest.
